ok. here's the pitch.
you know minesweeper? yeah. and that trend of minesweeper variants kicked off by hexcells, i'm gonna say, based on nothing?
imagine if you didn't have to play minesweeper.
imagine if you couldn't play minesweeper.
imagine if you taught the game to play itself.
bombe is a game reminiscent of the older zachtronics tradition, where the game made no attempt to hide that it was just fucking programming, except that bombe is tilted more towards the mathematical.
it takes the clues and creates "regions" of cells — if you play regular ol' square-cell minesweeper and see a 5, then that means there are 5 bombs in the eight surrounding cells, so bombe makes a "region" out of those eight cells and slaps a 5 clue on it. when a cell is revealed, it's removed from all its regions; if that cell was a mine, all the regions it's in are decremented, so the clues always correctly reflect the state of the board.
the first thing you have to teach bombe is that if a region has a 0 clue, none of its cells contain mines.
the second thing you have to teach bombe is that if a region has a 1 clue, and there is only 1 cell in that region, that cell is a mine.
then you get a 1 clue completely contained within a larger 1 clue.
then you get a 1 clue that partially overlaps a six-cell 5 clue.
and then it becomes completely unhinged.
you can never be wrong. bombe has a whole fucking logic prover in there somewhere and will never let you create rules that aren't airtight. no, the problem isn't in creating rules that are correct, but that are useful. you can see above that my colossal set of rules (nearing 300 at this point) is generating tons of extra information, but none of it is actually uncovering anything on the fucking board.
you can ask bombe for a "hint" (both good and useful to do, not a source of shame like most puzzle games), and it will find for you a handful of cells that you could make a deduction about and the specific regions that will lead to that deduction. but past a certain point, even that isn't enough. even if you give up on being clever and decide to just create a hyper-specific rule for every situation that comes up, it's still not enough. because some puzzles require a deduction that involves a chain of five or more regions, and you can't make rules that involve more than four regions. so even if you know what the next step would be, that doesn't help you. because like i said, you can't actually play minesweeper here. you can't just click a cell. you have to make a rule. so you have to figure out how to reduce the deduction to something simpler. and that is very difficult.
and in case that's not enough, there are other modes you can play that place different restrictions on the rules you can make. i am losing my mind. i think about set theory all the time now. i can see infinity.
it's great. i've had a few sleepless nights and that makes me barely functional the next day so i ended up playing like 30 hours of this in the three days since i bought it. i'm just barely ahead of @chaoticiak on several leaderboards though which i consider an accomplishment
also the game is ugly as hell. i didn't want to show the UI above because it's technically a spoiler (most of it unlocks as you make progress), but it is clearly someone just fucking slapping sprites around in SDL or something i don't know. truly ghastly. i've come to love it. feel free to ask anyone what the hell anything is because that's completely legit, half the game doesn't explain itself at all


